Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech & Sexual Harassment

The Wall Street Journal invited Richard Dooling to write its Millennial Essay on Swearing, One Thousand Years of Searing: From Swearing By To Swearing At.

Writing in the New York Times, Richard Bernstein called Blue Streak “a charmingly impudent essay on language and sexual politics . . . less an argument than it is a kind of illustration, an often extremely clever and creative sort of literary acting out. His chapters on swearing as a healthy, normal, entertaining, creative, cathartic and even ultimately peacemaking gesture, more practiced by men than women, are deep and funny at the same time. ”Swearing,” he writes, ”is the close cousin of magic, ritual, laughter, dreams, neurosis and reflex — all indispensable expressions of instincts and impulses.”